Nauvoo

After work on Friday June 13th, we drove down to Nauvoo for the weekend. I'm more of a night owl than Ethan, so I actually drove more than half of the trip which was shocking to all of us. ESPECIALLY since I drove across the Mississippi in the dark! I'm terrified of water at night.TERRIFIED!!!!  Like white knuckle scared, but I did it and didn't even drive us into the river. I know! I'm so cool!

I was in charge of finding a hotel and thought I did a great job but found out that I didn't. It was a dump of a place all the way in Keokuk, Iowa! When I say all the way, Iowa is only like 20 minutes from Nauvoo, but considering I thought we were on Main Street in Nauvoo, it was kind of a shocker. From now on, I'll leave Ethan to finding the hotels. Don't tell, but I was actually pretty excited to find out about my mistake. Not only did it give us another state for our summer count, but it gave us another state for our family map and a new state for MY individual count. 

 

Saturday June 14th, after we checked out of our hotel, we headed to HyVee, the local grocery store, for breakfast. HyVee apparently is the local hangout for the 70 plus crowd on a Saturday morning. Inside the store, they have created a little diner and seriously, we were the only ones under 70. The place was PACKED too! I kind of loved it. No one was in a hurry, no one was bothered by a slow wait, they were all just there to enjoy and be together.
I know I was awake in Iowa for less than 4 hours, but I might be able to say that Iowa has the nicest people in the whole world. Everyone was happy to see us, talked to us like we were their friends, and were just helpful over all. As we were leaving the store, the wind knocked over a display and like 3 people rushed over to help clean it up! I mean, just the nicest people ever.

We went to Nauvoo as part of a ward activity. Our ward was driving down that morning and were going to meet at the visitor center at 11:00. Since we went down on Friday night, we had some time to kill in the morning. With that extra time, we decided to make the 20 minute drive from Iowa to Carthage Jail.

 The walk way up to the visitor center had plaques which quoted Joseph Smith and his story

 The Joseph and Hyrum statue

 This is in front of the window that Joseph was shot at

 

 The door is still the original door. This is the bullet hole that was left from the 

bullet that shot and ultimately killed Hyrum

 

The outside of the window where Joseph fell to his death

 We all tried to watch the Joseph Smith video but a certain two year old wasn't having it so mom and said two year old played tag in the field. We found a Dandelion so it was a pretty awesome morning.

Carthage Jail was so amazing. While you are in the room where Joseph and Hyrum were killed, they play a tape with music and testimonies. It was very powerful. After sometime at Carthage we headed over to Nauvoo to meet up with the ward and that's where we spent the rest of our day.

Look at this cute little door knob! Most of the door knobs were like this

 This blew our minds. There are residents living in Nauvoo. Like people LIVE there. Non-missionary, non lds people live there. This home is a residential home. It even has a plaque on it that says like "Private Residence. Not for tours." Kinda weird. Besides the fact that Nauvoo is beautiful and you could have a HUGE backyard, why would you want to live in a town that is covered in tourist all summer! As I'm writing this, I'm laughing because the way I worded that made me think of moving to Chicago.

 Martin Harris's home

 Inside the visitor center. We had to FLY through this because we were trying to meet our ward and Kelsey was already showing signs of being two. I can't wait to go back to Nauvoo some day when I can REALLY appreciate all that is really there. 

 We did our own personal walking tour of Joseph Smith residence right along the Mississippi.

 Joseph and Emma's first home

 The Smith graveyard

 I never knew how beautiful Nauvoo was. This is not a picture of anything. It was just to try to capture how beautiful it was. So many beautiful trees.

 In Joseph's backyard

We stopped at the Brick Yard store which has been turned into a cute little touristy stop.  The second floor of the Brick Yard Store was where Joseph's office was.

 The site of John Taylor's home

 Brigham Young's home

 

Joseph and Emma's second home

Nauvoo had all the fixings to be a perfect day: Minimal crowds, beautiful 70 degree breezy non-humid weather, lunch provided by the ward, and all of us together like the little happy family we are. Enter the two year old.
Kelsey didn't care about the weather. Kelsey didn't care about the food (that's a lie. She LOVED the two bags of chips she mooched off the bishop). Kelsey didn't care about the amazing things we were learning. All Kelsey cared about was that we weren't at a park and she wasn't getting a nap. Kelsey is normally a very happy little girl and pretty go with the flow, but I guess we have just pushed her too much and too often lately that she decided that Nauvoo was the last straw. With out too many details, it was not her finest day. I was getting really frustrated wondering why we even bother to do anything at all with a toddler and was almost in tears (we were all a little tired) when Ethan so graciously offered to take Kelsey for an hour or more while I walked around Nauvoo. It was the most relaxing hour of my whole summer. Ethan and Kelsey played in the grass, laid on blankets, and sang songs, while I went in exhibits, listened to tours and actually got to enjoy Nauvoo. I am so grateful for Ethan and his kindness. He always knows when I'm at my breaking point and willingly steps up to the plate.
While Ethan took Kelsey, I was able to walk up and down main street. I didn't stop in too many of the buildings but the ones I did stop in were beautiful and really interesting. 

 I stopped in the print shop very briefly. The sisters inside were so cute. They were like "you look like you are in a hurry?" I explained about Kelsey and they just got the cutest smiles on their faces. They were like "We are grandmas. We understand. We'll give you the short version." In 5 minutes I was out. I could have stayed longer though because it was amazing. The process to print their newspapers was so tedious!

 

 All the letters were this small! They would line them all up and then apply the ink. I just can't believe that they did this! What if they messed up!!! I totally underestimate the convenience of computers.

 

My favorite stop of my whole alone time was  my stop to the iron smith shop. I don't know what it was about this stop but it was so interesting. There were only three people in my tour group so that too added to the specialness of it. Our cute little missionary was just so cute too. I wanted to give him a hug after. I may have been slightly emotion because I was finally relaxing from being with a screaming Kelsey. Anyway, the tour was great and the couple I was with were not members so their questions really made me think about my own beliefs. I also loved this couple because they were asking if I had a family and we got to talking about Kelsey being so grumpy today. I said something like, I'm just done. I might leave her here with our friends and walk home. The cute dad was like, "oh, you know you love her. Its just hard sometimes." It was the sweetest thing a stranger has ever said to me.

 During the end of the tour, they made a little horse shoe for all of us in the group. The process was fascinating. They took a piece of iron, heated it, hit it, turned it, bent it, hit it some more and then put it in cold water. I made it sound lame, but it was my favorite thing to watch. 

Here's our cute little missionary tour guide

 He concluded the tour with a cute love story about crossing the plains and we all got a Prairie Diamond ring! Its a ring made from a horseshoe nail. I was so happy!

 I also got to go to the Tin shop where I found my dream home decoration. I didn't know I loved tin so much, but this fountain lamp was gorgeous. I asked Ethan if we could buy it when we are older and come back. He gave me a confident maybe :) Its like 60 bucks so I totally understand. 

After about an hour, Kelsey had calmed down and we decided to meet up and try to do things as a family again. We went to the bakery where Kelsey got 3 cookies and went to the kiddie section. Kelsey found a baby doll in the play house and carried it around EVERYWHERE!!!! 

 

Nauvoo was fun, but let me tell you why we made Nauvoo especially memorable for the whole ward.  We were inside the Family Living Center, trying to decide whether to go to the bread, candle, rope, rug, or bucket making station when all of a sudden we looked over and Kelsey was climbing up a loom! I was so embarrassed. Ethan ran over helped her get down, but as he was helping her get down she started fighting him. He was able to wrestle her back to the ground, but as he did that, she tried to runaway. Well she tried to runaway before she was entirely balanced, started running, tripped on the brick floor, and fell. It all happened so quickly that she didn't have time to put her hands out in front of her at all and landed 100% on her face. And hard! Unfortunately I had to watch the whole thing happen.
I know Kelsey and I know her falls. She's pretty tough and can handle a lot. I can always tell when she is faking crying, crying out of fear, or actually crying out of pain. She was crying out of pain and that's where I started to lose my cool.

I ran over and immeditaley checked her little nose. No blood so I knew that all the pressure went to her mouth. I rushed outside (she's screaming at this point) tried to open up her mouth and couldn't move her top lip. We finally fought our way into her mouth and saw what appeared to be her front tooth through a layer of lip. It wasn't bleeding either so we assumed that the tooth was stopping the blood. Ethan jumped into action. He calmly got some help, tried to get ice or anything that he could to help the swelling and bleeding. while I tried to calm Kelsey down. As he was on the phone with a dentist in the ward (who happened to be there that day)I started to get light headed. I was straddling a bench singing to Kelsey, and next thing I remember was Ethan holding an ice pack to my head calmly telling all the ward members huddled over me that I do this all the time. I fainted! I FAINTED!!!!!

While I'm lying on the bench trying to convince people that I am actually fine Kelsey is starting to calm down. The dentist gets to our location looks at her lip and discovers that her teeth did NOT go through her lip and they are not even loose or chipped. Talk about blessings right?! As it turned out, her lip got stuck in between her little gap in her teeth. It looked like it went through because it went through the gap and then swelled up surrounding the tooth. He pulled it out, which hurt, but he said it didn't require stitches so he told us to worry about nothing.

So yeah. Not only did I faint while Kelsey needed me, but I fainted because of a puffy lip!!!! WHAT!!!!I am the biggest light weight. Seriously don't be alarmed. Its just the way my body reacts to high intensity. Scott does it too. We are weirdos together. But seriously. What I'm I going to do when an ACTUAL problem occurs. Like when a bone is broken or when teeth actually go through the lip or when stitches really are required! Maybe I can borrow Grandma's  emergency necklace!! Oh brother.

Can I just say though, that we have the nicest people in our ward. People we just met that day sprung into action to help. They called the right people, got food and ice and water, they took Kelsey while I was "recovering" and did all of it without even knowing our names. I felt so loved. I am so grateful for wards. And for nice people. I'm really grateful for nice people.

After the incident, we decided to call it a day. By this time is was 4:30. Kelsey was done, mom was still light headed, and dad was hungry. It was time to go!

 I really wanted to end the day by walking down Parley street which is the street the pioneers walked down on their way west. Its called the Trail of Hope. As we drove from the Living Center to Parley street to walk, the whole 200 yards, Kelsey fell asleep and stayed asleep for 3 hours!  Poor girl!
Ethan willingly drove Kelsey around while I walked Parley street. What was so cool about taking this walk was that now with the temple you can actually get a sense of how the pioneers felt leaving everything behind. It was really powerful for me.

 The view as you are walking down the street. I just can't imagine leaving everything for your faith. It a powerful example to me and makes me stop and think about my testimony.

 This is further down the street. Just some more of the beautiful landscape that they willingly left.

 The monument at the end of the trail right by the river

 The Mississippi

Since Kelsey was still asleep, we made one last stop to the temple and actually took pictures this time. The temple is gorgeous. Its about 60 feet tall, but probably only 100/200 meters deep. I love how perfectly they copied the pioneers' original design.  I know that was  the point, but they did a great job. I wish we had time to go inside. I heard its absolutely beautiful.

 

 

 This is the ceiling at the top of the stairs right before you enter the temple

 The view from the stairs

 The side view

Across the street, facing the temple is this beautiful statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. It was the most touching statue to me. Its called The Prophet's Last Ride and it  symbolizes his last ride to Carthage. I don't know why, but I loved it.

The view from the temple grounds

 The only thing we didn't have time for was to see the home where Relief Society was formed. It is off the beaten path and with the way that our day went it made sense that we missed it, but I guess that gives us reason to go back someday.

The drive home was uneventful and ended with a stop at Olive Garden in Peru, Il. We pulled into Chicago around 10:30 all very tired but very satisfied for yet another fantastic weekend in a fantastic summer.